Popeye Doyle was a brilliant character in a brilliant film. The hat was iconic.
He was great craic as Lex Luther in Superman aswell
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Henry Kelly was also a cricketer & anti-apartheid campaigner. What a guy. 
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I think itâs fair to say Kevin Myers has been on a journey since his anti-apartheid days.
I made the point here the last time I watched the film that if he had taken the fucking hat off he would have been much more inconspicuous and ergo a better policeman.
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And you wouldnât be a man for the hat yourself?
Iâm not a policeman trying to work undercover
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If you were, it would be a great cover.
He ticks a lot of the boxes actually.
It was a great hat though. When i think of The French Connection i think of Gene in the hat and also the little wave the French baddie gave him when the subway doors closed between them.
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Me oulâ fella taped The French Connection on BBC 1 the night before one of the Dublin-Meath replays in 1991.
âGreat film, Iâd say youâll like it, it has a great car chase.â
It was actually a car chasing a train, but anyway, he wasnât wrong. The opening credits and the assault of the sinister yet cool 1970s cop film music within the first one second, I loved it immediately.
In the days before I could waste my nights watching YouTube and clips put up by KilliamM2 on Twitter, I wasted my nights watching The French Connection on VHS about 100 times between about 1991 and 1996.
What Hackman did incredibly well was to portray raw, ignorant Thick Mickness in all its glory. As a 12 year old, I aspired to one day be a man like Jimmy âPopeyeâ Doyle. Jimmy Doyle was also the name of a Tipperary hurler and I looked at pictures of Jimmy Doyle in then 30 years old match programmes and he had a crew cut and was left handed and I thought that looked cool too so even though I was right handed I wanted to be a left handed hurler with a crew cut like Jimmy Doyle (and a left handed snooker player like Jimmy White) who would win the All-Ireland for Dublin and would also drink hard and get involved in car chases in my spare time like the other Jimmy Doyle. But unlike Jimmy Popeye Doyle (thatâs what Marty Morrissey would have called him), who drank Scotch whisky, I would drink Guinness, because that was what real men drank, though I did respect Scotch whisky (not whiskey, no e) and indeed Irish whiskey as being more manly than drinking pints of lager, or lager shandy, which is what my oulâ fella drank, because he didnât really drink at all. I was the only person in my confirmation class to refuse to take the pledge because I wanted to be like Jimmy âPopeyeâ Doyle. The girl I was in love with in my primary school class called me a junkie because of this and that made me feel all sorts of things.
In the end, some of this childhood aspiration came true, specifically the bit about drinking Guinness. I would indeed go on to drink Guinness, fulfilling the aspiration for real for the first time after Meath beat Dublin in the 1996 Leinster football final when I drank three pints of Guinness and a glass of Guinness for good measure before making a fucking tit of myself and then going home to watch Sonia OâSullivan running and then pulling up like sheâd just been drinking all evening with me.
The way Hackman played Doyle and his on the money portrayal of Thick Mick meant he would have been a shoo-in for the role of headstrong Galway hurling man whose son is playing for Galway in an All-Ireland final, who leaves his seat in the Hogan Stand to barge into the dressing room at half-time in that final to tell the manager he hasnât a fuckinâ clue what heâs doing, even though the team is leading, before the team goes out and completely flops in the second half.
But there was one key difference: Doyle was City Thick Mick, not Country Thick Mick. Unlike Country Thick Mick, City Thick Mick was smart. Deeply smart. Yet still utterly thick.
Alain Charnier played by Fernando Rey is one the great movie villains. He wrongfooted Doyle on the shuttle at Grand Central just like Johan Cruyff did that East German defender up like a kipper with that turn. The look on Doyleâs face was like the look on the East German defenderâs face when he looked the wrong way and then suddenly realised Cruyff had vanished into thin air. Woops, where is he?
It was a film where you wanted the goodie who was also a baddie and the baddie who was in his own way a goodie, to both win. In the end both sort of did win. Charnier won because he got away again. Doyle won because when he thought he was shooting Charnier dead he was actually shooting Mulderig, the cop he hated, dead. If I wasnât banned from entering America forever Iâd visit that ramp on Wardâs Island where Doyle waved at Charnier.
The French Connection II isnât quite as good as the original, but itâs still very good indeed, a Blur to the originalâs Oasis. I taped this myself off RTE 1 in July 1993. I very much liked the bit where Doyle is going cold turkey after the French lads have dumped him after injecting him with heroin.
âJean Kiely, yeah, Jean Kiely.â
âGene Kelly?â
âNo, not Gene Kelly. Jean Kiely. Heâs a skier.â
âAhhhh you mean Zjhonnng Claude Keee-leeee.â
âThatâs the guy.â
âWhat I want now is a nice PJ Clarkâs hamburger, with a lot a blood runninâ out of it, and onions, yeah, onions.â
Iâve always had a love for deep seated under the influence gibberish erupting from within people, most of all myself, after listening to these exchanges.
I also have a residual love for hats because Popeye Doyle wore a hat, and I bought me oulâ fella a Popeye Doyle style hat as a Christmas present in 2017. I must dig that out and wear it meself actually come to think of it now that I have about the same amount of hair as Popeye himself.
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A remendous stream of consciousness post there Sid.
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Oh, the memories.
Iâve never seen The French Connection or the sequel, I guess theyâll be on TV again now.
One of the great moments of the television age. You know those explainer books for plays and novels youâd get in fifth year English class, you could have an explainer book about that moment and why it was so powerful.
Contrast - The contrast between the sleek, fleet footed superhero Cruyff and the clod conceived East German who thought that his stumble had the poise and stride of Apollo.
The contrast between the shocking orange and black and the boring, dull blue and white. Boldness v conservatism.
Fantasy - sure it was like Roy Of The Rovers, Bill. Thatâs the sort of thing we all imagined when we were kicking ball off the wall of Tolka Park, even though, like 12 year old Johnny Giles, no one had ever seen it - Newness.
History - The Dutch hated the Germans because of the war, even though theyâd conveninently forgotten their part in collaborating with the Nazis, though you get the feeling that Johan Cruyff, if heâd gone into politics, would have been one of those pesky and fearlessly honest Dutch who would have consistently brought up Dutch collaboration with the Nazis and become deeply unpopular in Holland for it, and that he would have welcomed this. The East Germans denied their part in the war. If West Germany was winning the peace after Nazi Germany lost the war, the Dutchman was winning the peace against the war guilt deniers of East Germany by sending one of their defenders to the shops for a loaf of war bread.
Visual power - You look over there, but I am over here. The little look the wrong way yer man does and then his immediate but futile attempt to redeem the situation is Basil Fawlty-esque. The stumble afterwards is the icing on the cake.
Schadenfreude, or more to the point, cruelty - Everybody admired the turn. But really, everybody was primarily laughing at yer man. We like to laugh at people being professionally embarrassed by smarter people.
Johan Cruyff was one of these people, you know the saying âtheyâre dead behind the eyesâ, well whatever the exact opposite of that is, Johan Cruyff was. You could look at Johan Cruyffâs face and youâd immediately think to yourself âthereâs stuff going on in that head, a lot of stuff, good stuff, very good stuff, stuff that you wonât ever think or understand, average, unremarkable personâ.
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I never knew East Germany wore Swedens colours in the 74 World Cup
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Youâve caught me out something rotten there for not doing my research, but everything I said about East Germany in that post also applies to Sweden, so the post stands.
Bit of useless movie trivia with mentions of the Superman curse. Hackman died on February 26th the same day as Michelle Trachtenberg, Hackmans co star from the Superman movies was Margot kidder, both Kidder and Trachtenberg played the same character from Black Christmas in 1974 and itâs 06 remake.
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Iâm here for this sort of stat 
Boris Spassky.